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Surface faulting accompanying the Borah Peak earthquake and segmentation of the lost river fault, central Idaho

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, P.O. BOX 25046DENVER FEDERAL CENTER, DENVER, COLORADO 80225
U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, 345 MIDDLEFIELD ROAD, MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA 94025

Abstract

On the morning of 28 October 1983, the M_s 7.3 Borah Peak earthquake struck central Idaho and formed a Y-shaped zone of surface faults that is divided into a southern, a western, and a northern section. The total length of the surface faults is 36.4 ± 3.1 km, and the maximum net throw is 2.5 to 2.7 m. The near-surface net slip direction, determined from the rakes of striations in colluvium, averaged 0.17 m of sinistral slip for 1.00 m of dip slip.

The 20.8-km-long southern section is the main zone of surface faulting and coincides with the Thousand Springs segment of the Lost River fault. It has the largest amount of net throw, most complex rupture patterns, and best evidence of sinistral slip. The surface faults include zones of ground breakage as much as 140 m wide, en echelon scarps with synthetic and antithetic displacements, and individual scarps that are nearly 5 m high.

The 14.2-km-long western section diverges away from the Lost River fault near the northern end of the southern section. The net throw on this section is generally less than 0.5 m but locally is as much as 1.6 m. The new ruptures are poorly developed across the crest and north flank of the Willow Creek hills; they are mostly downhill-facing, arcuate scars, perhaps incipient landslides, that may overlie a deeper zone of tectonic movement.

The northern section, at least 7.9 km long, is on the Warm Spring segment of the Lost River fault and has a maximum net throw of about 1 m. The pattern of surface faulting on this section is simple compared to the other sections. A 4.7-km-long gap in 1983 surface faults separates the northern and southern sections but contains an older scarp of late Pleistocene age.

Geologic, seismologic, and geodetic data from the earthquake suggest that barriers confined the primary coseismic rupture to the Thousand Springs segment of the fault. The rupture propagated unilaterally to the northwest from a hypocenter near the southeastern end of the segment. The southeastern boundary of the segment is marked by an abrupt bend in the range front, a 4-km-long gap in late Quaternary scarps, and transverse faults of Eocene age that intersect the Lost River fault.

The northwestern boundary of the Thousand Springs segment is at the junction of the Willow Creek hills and the Lost River fault. Here, the southern and western sections of surface faults diverge and there is a gap in the 1983 scarps. During the first few weeks after the main shock, the large-magnitude and large stress-drop aftershocks clustered near this barrier. Later, aftershocks were mainly northwest of the barrier on the Warm Spring and Challis segments, and showed that strain adjustments eventually affected the entire northern part of the Lost River fault. Fault-scarp morphology and the bedrock geology suggest that the boundary between the Thousand Springs and Warm Spring segments has probably ruptured less frequently and had less net slip during much of the late Cenozoic than the interior of the adjacent segments. The 1983 faulting shows that although segment boundaries can stop or deflect primary ruptures, secondary surface faulting can occur on adjacent segments of the main fault. A late Pleistocene scarp in the 1983 gap suggests that infrequent earthquakes, perhaps larger than the 1983 event, might break through a segment boundary and thus release strain on two adjacent segments.

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